In case you missed it---Mitt Romney declared a story by ABC News about Marco Rubio’s veep-vetting status “absolutely false.” Yet other outlets found sources to corroborate the ABC report, and the Romney campaign’s handling of the story was strange from the get-go.

Perhaps more than any other show on the Fox News Channel, “Fox & Friends” has become a powerful platform for some of the most strident attacks on President Obama.Conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s religion once found an uncritical ear on the show’s set. Assertions that Mr. Obama leaked national security secrets for political gain are accepted as fact. And its hosts recently took time on the air to congratulate one of their producers for making a four-minute video that painted Mr. Obama as a failure.

Peters reports that the White House expressed serious concerns about that four-minute anti-Obama video that came off as a creation of the Romney campaign. “‘Do we make mistakes? Absolutely,’ said Bill Shine, executive vice president for programming at Fox News. ‘And when we make them we try to fix them, apologize for them, get out in front of them.’”

*More New York Times scoopage, this time from Brian Stelter, who reports that NBC is deep in negotiations with Ann Curry to transition her from co-host of the “Today” show into some other role.

The planning — which is taking place in secret and has not been finalized — is effectively an admission that all is not well at “Today,” the show that invented morning television 60 years ago and has inspired countless lower-rated competitors since. “Today” consistently ranked No. 1 in the morning ratings until this spring, when ABC’s “Good Morning America” beat it for several weeks.

The republication “danger zone” exists somewhere between rehashing the complete piece and the signature phrase. If a writer feels that he must revisit his old material, it’s only fair for him to alert readers that he may be taking them to a place they’ve already visited – unless, of course, he brings new literary value to the passages or presents new or newish findings. If he feels he has no alternative but to quote himself, it’s a simple matter to provide a footnote to the previous work, or a hyperlink, or some sort of disclaimer that alerts readers (and his publisher!) that he’s recycling.

Lehrer didn’t do this. He cheated his new publishers by breaking the implied (or written) contract that he was producing original copy. Today he’s apologizing for his recycling – “It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong,” he tells the Times – but I’m not buying it. No journalistic neophyte (he’s 30 years old with four books to his credit), Lehrer knew that the New Yorker would have rejected the gently used copy from his old Wall Street Journal columns had he informed them of the lack of originality of his “new” work.

*Bob Hall, publisher of the Philadelphia Media Network (Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.com) says that the company is headed for more losses.

Although reported in both newspapers last year that our company had a profit of $4,000,000, we actually lost a substantial amount. This reported number was before items such as interest, taxes, depreciation, etc. We will probably experience another substantial loss this year.